Carabas

I'm with a group of people looking around the ruins of this small castle or fortress. I'm trying to track someone down - I don't expect her to be here, but I know she was here sometime in the past.

Switching to third person view, there's a hidden room in the ruins somewhere below us. There's a kid inside, a little boy, the son of the person I was trying to track down. He's been a kid for 170 years. The spell or curse or whatever it is that keeps him frozen in time also means he can only speak for one day in each year. He's listening to us move around over his head, and thinking about how he's saved that one day of speech so he can give us a message now.

That same boy is walking down a suburban street, and he's spotted and recognized by a young woman in a passing car. She tells the driver to pull over, and he does. Her name's Giselle, and though she's a vampire she's never killed anyone - she's been kept away from people by the man driving the car and his wife, her sort of self-appointed guardians. They feel some kind of personal responsibility for her, but they're very nervous around her. They're looking particularly nervous right now, as she gets out and talks to the kid. She's very friendly, she's delighted to see him, but without really thinking about it, when she gets close enough she bites his throat. She can't help it. As a disembodied observer, I'm thinking that she's going to wind up serving as a sort of adopted mother to the kid, and it'll work out well for both of them as far as that goes. But I'm also thinking that this is a sign that our - her, me, the kid, the kid's mother, some other people - our window of opportunity to become human is closing for this timeline. Once we've missed that opportunity, we'll inevitably wind up dying off one by one - the timeline wrapping up loose ends.

There are these people with some psychic skills ranked on a 1-10 scale, where 10s are considered essentially monsters and hardly ever exist. A message has gone out to all these people to stay indoors tonight. One of them's being hunted down by a 10-ranked kid, and anyone else going outside now would just get mixed up in the hunt. This kid's treated like a living weapon, kept locked up aside from the rare outings like this, but he's just a kid; there's a feeling here like being let off a leash. Now he's levitating around outdoors - it's night, so he's not worried about being seen. I'm fond of the kid, and I'm aware that later he'll get away from the place that keeps him locked up, and that'll be good for him. The woman he's hunting calls her home to ask for help, but the woman who answers the phone has already got the message not to go outside tonight, and she's torn.

Sarah Connor's been running from something together with this guy who can't run anymore, and she can't carry him. She's trying to convince herself to just leave him and go, but when she tries, she only gets three feet before her knees give out. I'm aware it's because she's fighting her own desire to stay and help him. She's thinking to herself that she should have done something every day to train herself to do things she doesn't want to do.

Gwendolen Chant's sitting in her room at Chrestomanci Castle, writing. She's just gotten back from another world - she's looking for one to move to, and she's just crossed this last one off her list of potentials. She'd had an unpleasant encounter with a girl there, and she'd wound up enchanting the girl into some monstrous form. Gwen led the girl to believe she'd be trapped in that form forever, but she's thinking that actually it'll wear off on its own in about a century. And about another century after that, it'll slowly start to grow back again - Gwen's thinking the girl's reaction when that starts should be hilarious.